Reported Incidents Shed Light On Racial Bullying

ORLEANS – Damien was in Boston when he got the news no parent is ever prepared for.
 
In the spring of last year, his son, then an eighth grader at Nauset Regional Middle School, had attempted suicide. The attempt was brought on at least in part by racial bullying that he had been subjected to by his classmates.
 
“The morning that it happened, I was all the way in Boston,” said Damien, whose last name is being withheld to protect his son’s identity. “I work in Boston, I drive to Boston. That’s my job. So when I got the call that this happened, it was tough.”
 
Damien’s story is one of two instances involving racial bullying at the school that have been brought to The Chronicle’s attention in recent months. In both cases, parents of the victimized students, as well as a former middle school staffer, allege that district and middle school administrators failed to appropriately address the situation.
 
In separate interviews, Nauset School Superintendent Brooke Clenchy and the middle school’s principal, Peter Cohen, acknowledged the incidents and said that new protocols first put in place last year have helped curb the number of reported bullying incidents in the school so far this year.
 
Tristan Yovino was the middle school’s special education coordinator until September, when his position was eliminated due to staff restructuring, according to school officials. But Yovino alleges that the decision was retaliatory, citing friction between himself and Cohen that arose in part over Yovino’s role in supporting another educator who advocated for Damien’s son.
 
“I’m not about ruining somebody’s reputation,” Yovino, who started at the middle school last year at the same time as Cohen, said in an interview prior to the elimination of his position. “This has nothing to do with that. What it has to do with is what is happening right now, and how we as a district are allowing it to continue.”
 
Yovino said the student, a Black male, attempted suicide by taking pills. He said the student was subjected to racial name calling and “inappropriate touching” on his buttocks. In one specific case, he said, students staged what he called a mock “slave auction.”
 
“It was pervasive,” he said of the bullying. “This happened over several weeks and months. The principal was aware of this material and chose actively to avoid it.”
 
Yovino said the other educator, whom he oversaw in his role as special education coordinator, “repeatedly” brought the situation involving the student to Cohen’s attention. According to Yovino, Cohen had a “vendetta” against the staffer for their focus on racial issues that were happening in the school building.
 
Yovino also said that Cohen had taken to disparaging the educator in front of other school staffers, and that he made known his intention to “evaluate her out of the school.” This happened despite Yovino giving the educator what he called “a stellar” performance review.
 
“I had been in full support of (the educator), did not agree with how Peter treated her, berated her, and made her feel inadequate in front of her peers,” Yovino wrote in a complaint to the Nauset Public Schools human resources department dated Sept. 23.
 
Yovino claims that Cohen was dismissive of the report made about the racial bullying, and that he believed the student to be an “inaccurate reporter” because he has ADHD.
 
“Why can’t he be trusted because he has ADHD? I don’t understand that,” Damien said.
 
Cohen denied accusations that he downplayed the report or that he sought to have the educator in question removed.
 
Damien said his son had told him about the name calling from other students, which he said made him not want to go to school.
 
“He thought ‘This is my only way out. I can try something to see what happens,’” he said of his son’s suicide attempt. “I don’t know. He was very frustrated. He was very, very frustrated.”
 
Damien said his son was forced to miss school due to his hospitalization off Cape following his suicide attempt. But he said he was frustrated by administrators’ response to the incident, as well as their efforts to reintegrate his son back into the school upon his return.
 
“That school, they didn’t do much about the whole situation, the bullying and stuff like that,” he said.
 
Cohen said that students who miss school for extended periods due to hospitalization or other reasons are placed in the school’s Bridge Program temporarily upon their return. The in-school program offers returning students counseling and academic help to allow them to catch up before their return to their regular class schedule. Cohen said that students can spend “a full day or a series of days” in the program.
 
Clenchy said that any report of bullying and ensuing investigation is looked into with the involvement of parents. But through all of the alleged bullying, Damien said he was never approached by anyone at the middle school or the district to discuss it.
 
“Nobody called from the school and said ‘You know what? You need to come in and have a meeting’ or anything like that,” he said.
 
Cohen said that any report of bullying triggers an investigation by either himself or the school’s assistant principal. In this case, he said an investigation led to “a finding of bullying.”
 
“That particular case is really complicated in that there’s a lot of different factors,” he said. “There’s some in-school factors but there’s also out-of-school factors. There’s a mental health component. There’s all sorts of things going on, so we have to try to balance all that and make sure that students are safe when they’re here in the building.”
 
Damien added that he never learned about what punishment, if any, was given to his son’s alleged bullies. But Cohen said that approach is consistent with how the school handles disciplinary matters.
 
“We don’t typically share what consequences we put in place with all parties,” he said. “If a parent’s child is disciplined, they know what that consequence is. But the child of the victim doesn’t necessarily know what the consequence is for the other student.”
 
Cohen said this is done in the interest of protecting student privacy.

“Students in middle school, this is when they make mistakes,” he said. “And in many ways this is when we want them to make mistakes and prevent them from making mistakes when the stakes are higher. Everything is a teachable moment, so we don’t want kids to be branded or labeled as a bully because of a mistake they made in seventh grade.”

‘She never responded, ever.’

In a separate incident shared with The Chronicle, another parent took her concerns about the middle school’s response to bullying directly to Clenchy.

“She never responded, ever,” said Angie, whose name is similarly being withheld to protect the identity of her son.

Angie wrote Clenchy detailing cyberbullying her son, then a seventh grader, had experienced at the middle school in January. She said another student created a fake Snapchat account pretending to be her son, which was then used to wrongfully “out” him as being “gay for Charlie.” Angie’s son is half Chinese.

“I say this because there was a history of bullying with this student and some of it included racial remarks,” she wrote in her letter. “It is a fine line to know when to intervene and when to let your kid step up and handle the things that life throws at you, including bullies. For the most part, he was handling the bullying... until the incident with the fake profile was created.”

In her letter, Angie said she and her husband keep their son off social media, so it was not until he came to school one day that he learned of what had happened. Some students understood it to be a prank, she said, but others believed it to be true.

“He was completely caught off guard and incredibly embarrassed,” she wrote.

In a followup conversation, Angie said her son had encountered other forms of bullying at the school as well. But she said the Snapchat incident led her and her husband to take their son out of the middle school and send him to school in Provincetown instead. She said the bullying created a distrust of authority in her son and led him to constantly feel “on guard,” both in school and at home.

“It so affected my child that he was like a different child,” she said. “I went in and said ‘Listen, I have to unenroll my kid because they’re not safe here. He comes home everyday and he’s crying. He doesn’t do any extracurricular activities. He’s not the same child, and I can’t leave him here.’”

While she said the other student received a two-day suspension, Angie said school administrators should have done more to protect her son from further bullying. She said she asked a school counselor to separate her son and the other student so that they aren’t in the same classes or on the same bus. Instead, she said officials gave her the option of moving her son to another team.

“Why would you move my son when he’s the one that got bullied?” she asked. “Why should he have to suffer the consequences?”

Cohen said he could not speak to the specific circumstances involving Angie’s son. But he said while additional efforts can sometimes be made to keep students apart, it is often easier said than done.

“Both students, bully and victim, have a right to an education, and we’re required to provide that education,” he said. “So would we change a student’s schedule? Yeah, it’s possible that we would change a student’s schedule. Unlikely we would change their team. We have done that, but it is unusual.”

There have also been cases in the past in which teachers have “staggered” a student’s release from one class to the next in an effort to avoid them crossing paths with another student, Cohen said. But he said it’s difficult to ensure that any two students will be completely separated in school, especially during “unstructured” areas such as hallways or the school cafeteria.

Regarding the issue of cyberbullying, Clenchy said students’ easy access to phones, computers and social media makes it difficult for school administrators to stay on top of it. But that doesn’t keep the district from trying, she said.

“We don’t have control over what those kids are doing, but I’ll tell you, we still feel a level of responsibility,” she said. “Because if that comes into our building and students don’t feel safe or they don’t feel comfortable, that still is our problem, even if it was done outside of our system. So there are still measures we will take as a school district to work hard to stem that.”

The district also makes an effort to educate students about cyberbullying and proper social media use, Cohen said. In some cases, instances of cyberbullying are captured by parents through a “screenshot” and shared with school administrators. In those cases, cyberbullying offenses can more readily be addressed, he said.

“We try to message out to students, ‘If you don’t want us seeing something, don’t post it.’ We try to do a lot of cyber education about being a positive digital citizen. Because if they don’t want myself or the assistant principal to see what they’re posting, then don’t post it. Because people do take screenshots, and it does end up on our desk.”

Angie said her son is “much happier” as an eighth grade student in Provincetown, and that she doesn’t expect him to return to Nauset next year for high school.

“He doesn’t want to see those kids again,” she said. “He doesn’t really have a lot of faith in the Nauset school system. He’s been traumatized on a lot of different levels.”

A Lack Of Stability

Both Clenchy and Cohen say that issues with bullying, racial and otherwise, were evident upon their arrival at Nauset. Clenchy was named interim school superintendent in April 2021 before being hired to the post permanently in January 2022. Cohen was hired as middle school principal ahead of the 2023-2024 school year.

Clenchy said the issues she observed upon arriving at Nauset ran the gamut. Some were racially based, while others were “just general bullying, just inappropriate behavior.”

“Certainly when I came into the district four years ago, the middle school definitely was a school to pay a lot of attention to,” Clenchy said. “I think we knew very quickly out of the gate that we had issues, behavioral issues, etc. We were aware of all of that.”

Cohen said upon his hire, he observed “racial banter” and other “negative behaviors” at the middle school.

Clenchy said the middle school has hardly been an outlier when it comes to behavioral issues in recent years, however. In the aftermath of COVID-19, which forced teachers and students into extended periods of isolation and remote learning, she said there has been a concerted focus by school administrators on “reestablishing boundaries,” particularly at the middle school level.

“I think it was harder for that age group coming out of COVID, and I’m not even talking about Nauset. I’m talking in general,” she said.

More specific to the middle school, high turnover in the principal's office in recent years has created a lack of stability in the building, Clenchy said. Cohen is the middle school’s fourth principal dating back to 2021.

That instability and lack of consistent standards can create behavioral issues among students, Clenchy said. But she applauded Cohen, now in his second year at the school’s helm, and his team with helping restore the stability that has been missing in recent years. She said “there is not nearly the amount” of bullying today as there was in her first year in the district.

“If anything, I think Peter and his team have done such a good job at trying to stem this and leaning into the issue, rather than running away from it,” she said.

Cohen said students have taken to new protocols that have been put in place regarding behavior and bullying since his arrival at the middle school.

“It’s a consistent response,” he said. ‘It’s thorough investigations when these things come to our attention. It’s families and students knowing that we take these things very seriously.
It’s just pushing the message and reinforcing positive behaviors. We want to praise kids when they’re being respectful and being good citizens.”

A Regional Issue
 
Bullying is a reality in some form or another in schools and districts nationwide. But on Cape Cod, the problem has caught the attention of the Cape and Islands District Attorney’s Office as an issue of regional concern.
 
District Attorney Rob Galibois has publicly expressed in recent months his intention to try and secure additional funding for his office’s annual budget. Some of that money would be used to hire more clinicians to work within the Cape’s schools.
 
“In my mind, we have a disproportionate amount of hate incidents in our schools across the district,” Galibois said during a panel discussion on racism in Orleans in August.
 Leslie Domiguez-Santos, coordinator for the Barnstable County Human Rights Advisory Commission, said that the commission receives reports of bullying and harassment of all forms occurring in schools all across the Cape.
 
“We hear about race-specific taunting,” she said. “We hear about bullying that is homophobic, that is targeted toward people that have disabilities. Harassment and bullying comes up around religion, around languages spoken. So there are a lot of sensitive issues or vulnerable populations that come up within the schools, and specifically student to student.”
 
Dominguez-Santos said that the number of such reports coming into the commission have increased in her time with the county, specifically those involving race. But that does not necessarily mean that incidents of school bullying are on the rise, she said.
 
“What I don’t know is has that number of what’s happening out there actually increased, or do more people now know that they can report it,” she said.
 
Clenchy said while the district stressed the importance of responsible use of phones and social media upon students, it’s difficult to control what content students are being exposed to. She also pointed to the current divisive political climate, which she said also reaches the attention of students at the middle school level.
 
“When you have a school that is modeling one way and a political system that’s modeling another, they’re at odds,” she said.
 
“It’s hard to speculate, but I think our kids are certainly exposed to a ton of things online, whether it be through YouTube or even through the news,” Cohen said. “I’m not sure there’s always great models online for what it means to be part of a community.”

Beyond The Classroom

Other parents believe the issue of racism extends beyond the classroom and into extracurricular activities. One parent, who requested anonymity, emailed Cohen last winter with concerns after four eighth grade students, including her son, were not chosen after trying out for basketball.

“What do they all have in common? They are Black boys not playing basketball because the school has made excuses for what’s really going on,” she wrote in an email to Cohen.

The parent said her son was identified by coaches as being “not coachable,” an accusation she refuted by sharing a recommendation from her son’s youth football coach vouching for his leadership and character.

In a follow up email, Cohen acknowledged “bias” in the school but stood behind the process and metrics that were used to select students to play on the team.

“As I shared with you in our meeting, I know that bias exists in our school,” he wrote. “We are taking concrete steps to work on this with our faculty and with our students.”

What’s Next?

Damien’s son now attends Nauset Regional High School, and his father said that he has benefited from the change of scenery his new school has offered him.

“To tell you the truth, he’s doing way, way better,” he said. “He’s got more friends. He’s playing sports, playing football, so it’s a lot different.”

But that doesn’t mean the bullying his son incurred at the middle school has been forgotten. In the fall, Damien said he was working with a lawyer to potentially bring suit against the school district over what transpired, but had not decided whether or not to do so.

Cohen reiterated that the instances of bullying and cyberbullying have “dramatically” dropped this year, which has helped foster a more positive environment within the middle school. But he also said the work to address bullying and promote a more inclusive school environment is ongoing. Part of that involves building closer relationships between students and their teachers and administrators. It also involves recognizing past mistakes and improving upon them, he said.

“As hard as some of the cases are that you’ve cited, all of those things are lessons learned for all parties involved for us to get better,” he said. “And that’s what we’re trying to do, continuously improve.”

And it’s not just school staff and administrators that are working to do better, according to Dominguez-Santos. She said that many students in schools across the region see themselves as having a role in addressing the issues of racism and bullying.

“What I hear from students all the time is ‘Don’t hide it, talk about it,’” she said. “Have the school assembly. Bring students together and say ‘Hey, this thing happened, and our community is better than this. Our community is stronger than this. Here’s what we as a school administration, here’s what we as a school community, can do to make sure that everyone feels safe and respected.’ So the students are asking for that. They’re saying ‘Let’s deal with this.’”

Email Ryan Bray at ryan@capecodchronicle.com